Saturday, April 25, 2015

Small is Beautiful in the Sandbox

One of the most satisfying parts of
being part of a hobbyist subculture that loves pulling up the hood
and jawing at disturbing, perhaps commitable length about the various
whirly bits is running into your own little epiphanies. Tuesday I
slammed my laptop cover down and threw my triumphant fist in the air
with a “fuccck yeah” with the last great push on the Misty Isles of the Eld manuscript (the second big stretch goal
adventure coming out of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes project,
Fever-Dreaming Marlinko being in lay out).

Later that night with the
self-congratulation dying down it struck me that after laying down
yet another small bounded 1-4 session wilderness area that the
mini-sandbox has been my favorite way to game wilderness for a good
long time. I mean thinking back to my beloved hoary TSR favorites
Castle Amber, The Secret of Bone Hill, Keep, and that Gygax
Lovecraftian temple one that I am suddenly too lazy to look up they
all to a one have a small wilderness area (and often a small scale
human civilization bit) as a short main exploration phase.

Somewhere horseshoe close to when D&D
was born and the oil crisis was rearing its head, a collection of
essays called Small is Beautiful became a public intellectual
one-hit-wonder. Needling large-scale economies and political
organization as being beyond a sustainable human scale.

Hey but fear not I come not to throw
some politics or meaty real world thought in your face-- besides I'm
still enough of an Old Leftist/Modernist reactionary to freakishly
get a woody walking the grounds of the rusting hulk of a
horizontally-integrated factory complex like the Ford Rouge—but to
acknowledge there is something there there when it comes to designing
to wilderness settings.

Insert your mileage disclaimer—by now
we all know that people who talk in absolutes in a hobby environment
are buttholes—but I think there really is something there in this
area when it comes to sustaining a long campaign. Think of it this
way, D&D is primarily a game where the main play experience is
meticulously exploring highly-contained space. It doesn't have to
be a dungeon but that classic format sure comes back over and over
because it simply works

Wilderness hexcrawling has been there
too as a suggested major play arena since the get go. OD&D has
its random generators. B/X went even further presenting it as
conceptually as a whole new campaign frame for when PCs hit
mid-level. But from my experience there has always been something awkward and challenging about making all that wide yawning space notboring—and thus something you and the players will return to time
and time again continuously.

I have been running the Feral Shore
with its central hex-organized map as a major campaign phase now for
a year and a half. But the actual thorough wilderness hexcrawl
sessions have been a minority often a “we really need to get down
to figuring out what is going on behind that ridgeline of the Domovoy
villages” kind of impulse from the players. At most even when
really player focused we have never done more than three such
sessions in our weekly game in a row.

Invariably some other goal—exploring
the smaller bounded area of say the Rusevin (a city ruins pointcrawl)
or more prevalently a single-site or those beautifully eccentric
player-driven quests (“shit really need to go find that Drinking
Horn of Radegast to get those drained life levels back”)--pushes
its way forward and becomes the main thing.

The hexcrawling in other words is more
often a palate cleanser much like a one-off town adventure. Not
consciously I believe that's how I prefer, short sprints of such
activity around the main course. Maybe that's how it should be:
better-designed wilderness should be small in frame and densely
packed with sites. (Or maybe I am just rationalizing my own design choices with the Dunes as a small bounded mythical wilderness pointcrawl and the Misty Isles as a small bounded extra-planar pointcrawl?)

But back to you...

Is that the kind
of thing you have experienced? Have you run—and enjoyed—long
hexcrawl-centered campaigns or campaign phases? What made it
different you think? What's your secret, bud?

My own Iron Coast hexcrawl game has been going on for two years now, and the team has explored all of about 5 6-mile hexes. So much other stuff keeps popping up (fighting pirates in a city, crawling through ruins, fighting ver-men in extinct volcanos, etc.) that it would be disingenuous to be disappointed.